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Writing alongside the specter of premature death, Tisa Bryant traces the contours of Black women’s interior lives and domestic spaces through meditations on literature, cinema, installations, and archival research to reaffirm her own way of being.
In the long aftermath of her mother’s death, Tisa Bryant’s Residual retrieves and catalogs what remains of her home, her psyche, and her creative practice. She filters through the remnants of her mother’s everyday life asking, what else is an archive—a bookshelf, a dresser drawer, a relationship, a secret? Drawing on personal memories and impressions as well as archives of renowned Black women, who also died prematurely, including playwright Lorraine Hansberry and science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler, Bryant’s hybrid memoir details the intimate accretion of ephemera, outrage, intention, impressions, and failure in the wake of loss.
—Lara Mimosa Montes
"Enigmatic, powerful essays address Bryant’s work to come to terms with her mother’s life and death."
—Kristen Rabe, Foreword Reviews
"Tisa Bryant is, quite simply, an icon. Her work lives not on my bookshelf but on an altar of formative texts as cherished, to me, as Toomer, Rilke, and Carson. In Residual, she grieves her mother as though solving a mystery, creating a portal that is also a museum, an account of her own becoming, aliving, breathing stage set. The pages are haunted by authors and artists across space and time, a presence that is not, as she writes, “an academic affair,” but a kind of lighting, longing, and music that enlivens the walls and corners of Bryant’s interior world."
—Aisha Sabatini Sloan
"Tisa Bryant unmakes and remakes diasporic attachments, offering a poetic genealogy that is animated by flowers, perfumes, chrome furnishings, wide plank floors, plush sounds and song. Within, moments of incredible loss are knitted to faded familiarities, disintegrated papers, Cicely Tyson, laughter, trouble. Residual is a wonderful spatial experiment."
—Katherine McKittrick